“That fellow had a history, but I haven’t time to tell it. Leadville is full of such characters, and it only needs to put one’s self en rapport with their happy-go-lucky good humor and stoicism under all sorts of fortune to find these miners, at heart, the best fellows in the world. They have a high regard for a gentleman, but a hatred of a swell; no objection to good clothes, but a horror of ‘frills;’ a high respect for genuine virtue, but boundless hatred of cant; an admiration for nerve amounting to worship, but a contempt of braggadocio that often results in an impulsive puncturing of both the braggart and his boasts. A ‘tender-foot,’ that is, a new arrival from the East, green in the ways of mountain life, they consider fair game for tricks and chaff. Usually they attempt to frighten him, and his behavior at such initiatory moments determines, to a large extent, his future standing in the camp.
MOUNT OF THE
HOLY CROSS.
MOUNT OF THE HOLY CROSS.
“But this is a digression from the subject in hand, which is the reduction of the ores. The smelters cannot be allowed to cool off, and so are run the twenty four hours through. One evening we made up a party and visited one of the great smelters. Its chimney-stacks pour noxious smoke over a nest of cabins down on the bank of the creek, and guide us, by scent as well as sight, through the streets and across the vacant lots. The broad upper floor is divided along one side into a series of bins, opening outwardly into a shed, under which the teams drive that bring the ore. Each owner’s lot is put into a bin and kept separate until sampled and paid for. This sampling is a process akin to homeopathy. Supposing one hundred tons are to be sold at the smelter. Every tenth ton, as fast as delivered, is set aside to be sampled. This ten tons is then subdivided,—perhaps by being carried from one part of the floor to the other in wheelbarrows,—every tenth load being set aside. The single ton thus remaining contains many large, hard lumps. These are roughly screened out and put through a crusher, which chews them into fragments no larger than walnuts. The heap of a ton of broken material thus formed is now separated in a very ingenious way, by catching a few lumps of the ore from each shovelful in a ‘scoop,’ which a man holds above the wheelbarrow wherein the main portion is carted back to the original pile in the bin. The saved portion, which has happened to fall into the scoop, constitutes a new sample, to be further reduced, by successive crushings and screenings, until finally there remains only a pound of earth as the perfect representation of the average quality of the five hundred tons of rocky ore offered from the mine. This pound is then ground to powder on the bucking board, and a tenth or twentieth is taken for the scientific fire-test, or ‘assay,’ which shall determine its value. All these processes go on at night as well as by day.
“The red-brown ores lay in little heaps about the floor when we entered, divided from one another by low partitions. Men with spidery wheelbarrows were cruising about, dumping a pile of precious earth here, shoveling up another there, with seemingly aimless purposes, and the bins were only like so many openings to a mine, so deep were the shadows hiding their recesses. Across the room, lanterns showed four great circular chambers of iron, from whose depths hoarse rumblings drowned in a deep, steady bass the energetic crunch-crunch of the insatiate ore-chewers. Wide door-ways admitted into these dungeons, where surging volumes of murky vapors were confined, and through their hot portals red-shirted men hurled the raw material that should be digested, and the worthy part of which should issue from the furnaces below in a bright and costly stream: first a barrow load of carbonate ore, next one of charcoal, then a third of iron and limestone-flux.